


Train Song

by masterofesoterica



Series: Female Snape AU [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Consent Issues, F/F, F/M, Female Friendship, Female Severus Snape, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape Friendship, Mentor Severus Snape, Out of Character, Severus Snape Adopts Harry Potter, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-11
Updated: 2016-10-11
Packaged: 2018-08-21 19:48:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8258332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofesoterica/pseuds/masterofesoterica
Summary: Sometimes, a friendship is infinitely more.Girl!Snape and Lily and their years at Hogwarts; friendship, family, reconciliations, and happy endings (deserved or not).





	

 

It was hard being Lily’s friend. Sometimes she sympathised more with Petunia. All ugly, awkward little girls ought to stick together. But then Petunia would go and do something awful, or else Petunia would be _just there_ , reminding her of how Petunia didn’t need to wear frayed hand-me-downs from Mrs. Evans and how she didn’t have a house with no heating and no running water. She’d see Petunia and realise that Petunia had a mother who brushed her hair, dull and blond as it was, and ironed her dresses. And then she’d think how some little girls would always be even uglier and more awkward than others.

Her father would’ve done better with a boy, she thought. He always wanted to yell at her, scream and beat her when he’s drunk—and angry about being poor, being useless, being uneducated—but he never could. He was always restrained by some sort of twisted chivalry that never quite extended to her mother.  On his better days, when she was younger, he used to carry her up on his shoulders, his hair wiry and rough against her hands and so unlike her own. He’d take her to the pharmacy for the drugs he said her mother needed, and on the way back he’d be subdued, clutching her shoulder with one hand and holding on to the paper bag tightly with the other.

No one took notice of her, not even in Slytherin. When the hat shouted out the house, there was only a polite smattering of applause and no one bothered to make a space for her on the benches. And it didn’t matter that she was the best potion maker in her year and more talented with spellcraft than most graduates. It didn’t matter because she was slumped and greasy and she had her father’s nose. The other girls had silk-lined robes and curled hair and faces that were fresh with youth, if not true beauty. She didn’t matter because she could never possess that particular currency of power. Those in her house soon came to see her as a mistake that hat had made; perhaps, they thought, the hat could not place such an ugly thing and had bought into the old prejudices of the founders. Those in the other houses saw her as nothing more than someone Lily had taken pity on—an inconvenient lapdog that trailed Lily everywhere. If she were honest with herself, Lily had always had a penchant for wild and broken creatures.

 

\---

 

In her third year, Narcissa Black takes an interest. She gives her long, appraising looks with her icy blue eyes when no one’s watching. She was meant to notice though. Narcissa takes the time to help her with Transfiguration, her least proficient class. Narcissa’s long fingers and varnished nails linger on her arm as she corrects her wand grip; her lips are red and shiny. She is snared by Narcissa one day in the deserted girls’ bathrooms on the second floor. The older girl towers over her, long blond hair straight and shiny, her body pressed too close. Narcissa’s perfect porcelain skin smells of oranges and jasmine.

“It’s a pity,” Narcissa says in her cultivated tones, “you could have something going for you. Hmm. Half-blood, but that is a small thing if you can use it.”

Narcissa’s hands are all over her. They stroke and pat her flanks as though she were horseflesh Narcissa was mildly interested in buying. They roam over the front of her robes where her breasts still have not made their presence known. They card through the greasy hair that hangs over her face and down to her waist. And they ghost over the curves of her cheeks, the long hollows of her face, and finally the curve of her nose.

“Oh yes, I can work with this.”

She knows the older girl wants to see something in her pallid skin that’s not there. She doesn’t want Narcissa’s deceptive sheen of perfection. It’s cold. And she needs fire. She’s known it since last week when she saw Lily’s hair lit up by the brilliant sun. Before that, she might have been seduced by Narcissa’s promises.

“I don’t want to be your little pet project,” she spits.

Narcissa slaps her then, nails drawing red. In Narcissa’s flashing face, Sev catches a glimpse of Lily, the times she had lost control and flown at her, teeth bared.

She’s pressed up against the wall, the water from leaking pipes is creeping down the back of her robe, sending shivers along her limbs. Narcissa is still flush against her, one leg between her knees. Her pale lips are twisted in a smile as she traps the younger girl.

“You’ll know to find me, Severina,” she says. And then she dips her head forward and catches the other girl’s dry lips in a kiss, drinking in the slightly bitter taste, and imprinting her own signature there.

After Narcissa leaves, she sinks to the floor and cradles her cheek against her hand and all she can think of is red, red, red.

 

\--- 

 

It’s fifth year and she’s staying behind for Christmas as she had every year. Lily had gone home. She sits alone every day until one day she glances up from her soup and meets a pair of dark grey eyes. She knows why Black is here of course—staying behind in the holidays. She’s heard all about the running away and the disinheritance and the disgrace of it all from Regulus’ whispered conversations in the Common Room (which naturally every Slytherin heard), not to mention the howler that arrived at the Gryffindor table at the beginning of the year.

Black sits down in front of her unselfconsciously and she is immediately jealous—of his grace and ease and careless handsomeness.

“You’re the one who hangs around Lily,” he says without preamble, “you’re in Slytherin.”

“Yeah,” she mutters, staring at her bowl again, “so?”

“It’s just…” he begins.

“What,” she’s angry now, she thinks she knows what he wants to say. “Why would she want to be friends with me, right? Well not everyone is so high and mighty, so full of themselves as those in the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black!”

He’s staring at her with an eyebrow raised. She thinks how he had thrown everything away as though it were nothing—everything that lifetimes could not accumulate—and he’d just let it go as though it were no more important than an old, used-up quill.

She sneers, “How the mighty have fallen. Now you’ve been kicked out on your arse, how will you keep paying Potter and Lupin and the little hamster to keep hanging around you? You wanker.” She gathers up her books and stalks upstairs to the library, making sure that she isn’t followed. Perhaps her words had not been the best she might have mustered, but she had been too angry to care.

The next day, he’s sitting in front of her again. She ignores him.

“First thing,” Black says, “you know nothing about any of it. You don’t know what my _family_ is like.”

There is something honest and feral in his gaze, and there was no denying the venom when he’d said “family”. She feels herself softening a little towards him.

“Second thing. You didn’t let me finish,” he says, “yesterday, I only meant to ask you something. Since you’re Lily’s friend, do you know what she might like for Christmas. James—Potter—he wants to get her something to show he’s _serious_ about _wooing_ her.”

James, she thinks, and feels a wrenching in her gut. She imagines James and Lily walking hand in hand, and sitting, arms linked, in the alcove of willows by the lake that she and Lily had found in their first week. Her mind revolts at the image. But Lily had been fond of James since third year, and James had never treated Severina with anything but indifference—which was the best she could hope for of anyone. Yet the thought of Lily and James filled her mouth with the taste of bile.

Something of her disgust must have shown on her face, because Black says, “James—he’s a lovesick fool.”

“Right,” she says, thinking of how Lily had often spoken of Potter with a grin that revealed her slightly crooked teeth. Lily never smiled like that when they spoke of anything else, now. When they were young, Sev could wring that smile out of Lily; now, only the thought of James could.

Sirius’ eyes were still upon her. She’s feeling a little foolish now. She can’t tell it he’s telling the truth, but no one at Hogwarts, apart from Lily, had ever looked at her the way that he was now doing, as though he were actually seeing her face—not as though he were wishing that someone else was there in her stead. She feels an unsteady blush on her cheeks suddenly, and she knows it is not a pretty sight.

On the last day of the Christmas break, she lets Sirius fuck her on the floor of one of the greenhouses. He’s fumbling but eager. She doesn’t do more than clutch at his shoulders and lie there. When he comes, he’s silent and buries his head in the crook of her neck. She brings herself to climax with her own fingers as he watches, after. The next day, when the term begins again, she overhears Black in Potions. He calls her frigid; he asks James for the galleons promised, and James laughs and laughs and Pettigrew joins in and Lupin moans like he’s in pain. She forgets about the ache between her thighs and makes their cauldrons explode with well-directed wordless spells. Black stares at her as though he were tasting something bitter in his mouth.

Black writes her six letters. She doesn’t open any of them, pushing them into the bottom of her trunk.

 

\---

 

After their last O.W.L.s, she and Lily are sitting in the courtyard in a shady corner. Lily threads her hand through her own. They can both feel a darkness in the air; it’s sharp and neither of them can escape it. They were almost seventeen and soon they’d be called to meet it. She did not yet know whether it would be as friend or foe. James’ bracelet—the one she’d picked out years ago but never had the money to buy—hung from Lily’s wrist.  Lily had told her they’d become an item in February. A week after Lily’s birthday.

She’d made Lily a potion for her birthday, as she did every year. It was the Euphoria. They’d drunk it by the lake and laughed until the effects wore off. It was the seventh birthday they’d spent together—perhaps that was why it had felt different—rich as though the memory of it were embroidered with jewel coloured thread in the tapestry of her mind. It had also felt terribly, forebodingly final.

“Sev,” Lily says, “I don’t know what to do. I think we should leave this place.”

“Leave?” She rubbed her fingers over Lily’s smooth, soft palm. She knew without the words being said aloud what Lily meant.

“I know you know more than me, Sev, you’re in the serpents’ den after all.” She giggled nervously.

“I don’t know anything really,” then with a little bitterness, she added, “they think I’m useless, I wouldn’t be useful to their _cause_.”

“Oh, Sev. You don’t need to be useful to _them_. They’d only suck you dry. They wouldn’t help you if you needed it.”

She wondered if that was the way Lily felt about everyone in her house. She pulled away slightly, curling in upon herself, drawing her knees up to her chest. Lily was wrong; there had been girls who’d corrected her wand movements when she’d been frustrated with a new spell, and girls who’d lent her their outgrown robes when she hadn’t enough of her own clean ones. Lily would never understand these little things; Lily had always been the recipient of a hundred little favours a day.

And yet—there had also been Narcissa. She never spoke to her again, outside of purely transactional and formal interactions. The older girl hadn’t touched her again.

“I’ll go to Italy,” she says at last, “me mam’s still got some family there.”

“Yes,” Lily says, looking down at her wrist, where the slender chain of silver encircled it. “It’s customary, isn’t it, for witches and wizards to take a grand tour after graduation?”

“Yes,” she says warily.

“Then we’ll take the grandest tour known to wizardkind. We’ll go to Greece and Egypt and France and Italy. We’ll go even further. India and China and Siberia. Maybe we should leave the lived world all together and go to the Amazon. Just you and me—like when we were nine and by the river. Wouldn’t it be marvellous?”

Her heart stuttered incoherently in her chest; she looked at Lily in something like wonder. Lily’s fingers tightened around her wrist and Sev managed to return her brilliant smile with a tremulous one of her own.

 

\---

 

It never happened like that. Lily announced her engagement to Potter in the last week of seventh year. She’d accepted his proposal because it had been genuine and not ostentatious. Lily planned her wedding and Severina planned her trip to Italy. She sends her O.W.L. results and Slughorn’s modest letter of recommendation to all the potion masters she could find near her family’s old home town in Italy. She tries to dredge up long forgotten skills in Italian. She waits anxiously for her N.E.W.T results. Her mother neither approved nor disapproved; she was too numbed to the world to care, so she wrote letters in her mother’s name to her aunts and uncles and cousins. Her father, if he noticed her plans in the making, said nothing. Finally, when a letter arrives from her great aunt Lucilla, she writes back immediately and begins to prepare herself for travel with more relief than happiness.

Lily’s wedding invitation arrives near the end of the summer. She considers briefly burning the invitation and sending her apologies, but Lily is her oldest friend, the only and best friend she’s ever had. Lily hasn’t requested her to be her Maid of Honour or anything like that—she knew Severina much too well for that—but it was clear from her handwritten note attached to the invitation that Lily expected her. Although Lily’s tone suggested she wouldn’t be surprised if Sev chose to send her regards from afar instead. Sev was determined that she should go however, scraping together a little of her savings to buy a new set of dress robes that fit her well, but are not so ostentatious that they could not be worn from day to day. The robes are cut to flatter her skinny frame, in a shade of dark blue with delicate threads of silver around the throat and sleeves. There were spells woven into the cloth in increase its longevity, and runes carrying hopeful wishes for the wearer. In all, thoroughly traditional. She wondered whether she should’ve bought a muggle dress instead.

The autumn morning dawns crisp and clear. She stares into the mirror, wondering whether anything could be done about her face. Lily had asked her to meet her early at her parents’ house—it would be the first time she’d been there since school finished. Sev wondered whether she’d really be of any help at all, or whether she’d just be an awkward addition to the wedding party. As she stared at her plain, pale face in the mirror, her mother shuffled into the bathroom.

“Rina,” Eileen says, with a strange wonderment in her voice, “are those new robes?”

“Yes, mam,” she says, “It’s Lily’s wedding today. You remember Lily?”

“Lily, yes. Sweet girl.” Eileen shrugged off her heavy dressing gown. Underneath, she wore a thin nightdress that did not hide the emaciation of her body. Eileen had been sick for as long as she could remember. “Run me a bath would you?”

“She’s marrying a Potter,” she says as the taps run with rust and rattle the walls.

“Good family, the Potters,” Eileen says as she perched at the edge of the tub. “Fleamont Potter, I remember him from Hogwarts. Older than me, of course, good potioneer. He married Euphemia and half the school were invited. She was a quidditch player—flashy, not unkind.”

Severina watches the bathtub slowly fill with hot water. It was so rare that Eileen offered any talk of the wizarding world. She wondered, in fact, if Eileen had ever talked of her time at Hogwarts. But it seemed as though her mother wanted to say no more. “Let me help you,” she says instead, helping Eileen out of her nightdress and step into the bath.

“You look well, Severina,” Eileen says, reaching up to cup her cheek briefly, “Aunt Lucilla will be pleased to have you.”

“She wrote to you?” She was ashamed and guilty at once, crouched by the side of the bathtub.

“Yes, Rina, and I am not so oblivious as you might think.” There is silence as those words linger in the steam rising from the bath.

Suddenly, Eileen seizes her hand hard. “You must promise to take care of yourself. You cannot imagine how glad… Please, Rina, swear to me that you will stay away from this—corruption—that is out there.”

“Mother—I—”

“Promise me, please. I know what is out there. You are my daughter. Promise me that you will belong to yourself alone. We in Slytherin are not too proud to do what is needed for those we love. But please, Rina, let those things that you do hold with the convictions that we who love you have taught you.”

She felt the sting of tears in her eyes. This was perhaps the most her mother had ever said to her. “Yes, mother, I promise.”

“My daughter,” Eileen says, and pressed a papery kiss to Severina’s forehead. Releasing her hand, Eileen leaned back in the bath, and she knew that her mother would have no more energy for days to come.

So Severina leaves her mother, and walks the familiar path, through the playground, to Lily’s parents’ house. The wind dries the tears on her face.

 

\---

 

“It’s you.” Petunia stares down at her disapprovingly, as though she were a flower arrangement mistakenly delivered to the house.

“Is Sev here?” Lily’s voice drifts faintly from somewhere inside the house.

“Yes,” Petunia calls back, pulling Severina into the house and shutting the front door in one swift movement. “Why did you have to where those _robes_ here? Anyone could have seen.”

She shrugs. The robes looked close enough to a long sleeved dress from afar.

“Lily’s in the back room. With all her other _friends_.” Petunia says this derisively; she knows Severina had no other friends. “I’m surprised you’re not a bridesmaid. Maybe Lily does have a little taste.”

She merely sneers at Petunia, and pushes past her as she steps into the back room. Lily is dressed in a beautiful, if rather old fashioned, ivory gown. She sees runes woven into the fabric of the dress, and imagined that it had to be a Potter family heirloom. She sees runes for good fortune, fertility and longevity before Lily stands up and sweeps her up in a hug. Sev feels choked for a moment, with Lily’s slender fingers pressing into her shoulder blades. Lily’s hair is soft and smells like magnolias.

“Thank you for being here,” Lily whispers, and releases her.

“You look perfect, Lily,” she says, staring at a point somewhere above Lily’s shoulder.

“Come here, you remember Marlene? And Mary too.”

Sev greets them quietly, listening to them both in silence as they chattered about the guests, the arrangements for the wedding, and their plans for Lily’s baby shower, which they were sure would be happening soon. She is given little tasks to do after she rejects Marlene’s offer of a ‘makeover’.

But mostly, she stares around the living room, recalling the television set they had sat in front of as children, the baby pictures of Lily and Petunia on the walls which Mr. Evans had been so happy to show her the first time, and the record collection in the corner which Lily had taken so much pride in adding to, with the records she bought using her own pocket money. Through the living room, she could see into the kitchen, with its familiar linoleum floor, and Mrs. Evans’ begonias on the windowsill.

When Marlene and Mary are called by Petunia to get ready upstairs, she is left alone with Lily, who picks up her hand and holds it out of habit. They are silent, listening to the footsteps upstairs and the rise and fall of their own breathing.

She wonders if she might pull Lily into the backyard, where they might lie down beneath the oak tree again, and make plans for the tyre swing that would never come into fruition.

“I have a gift for you,” she says instead, “I’m sorry it may not be much.” Sev pulls out a shrunken book from her pocket, and taps it quickly with her wand so it resumed its original size. It is a thin children’s book, taken from her own shelf. She remembers seeing it in the bookstore window with her father, and Tobias had laughed when she’d pointed to it, agreeing to buy it for her without hesitation. It hadn’t mattered to her that her father never read it with her, because she’d met Lily the very next day, and they’d read it together, sitting on the old swings.

She’d animated the illustrations so that the stars shone on the pages and the Iron Man moved and the dragon flew through the sky. She’d imbued the pages with invisible weaves of spells that would bring calmness and peace to the reader. She’d had to find the peace within herself first. Her hands shook as she held out the book to Lily. “Your children will love it as we did.”

“I’m so sorry Sev, I could never love you as much as you deserve.”

“You made all the difference, Lily.” I have learned of life through you, she does not say.

Lily’s green eyes are soft, half-lidded. She takes the book and holds it to her chest.

“I hope you will be happy, Lily.”

“I am.” And her green eyes shine through her tears.

The rest of the day passes in a blur.

 

\---

 

Great Aunt Lucilla picks her up from the glass and chrome train station in Rome, looking only a little out of place in her severe black dress, her iron grey hair half hidden behind a headscarf, and her nose as hooked as her own. Yet, somehow, she knew that Lucilla was once strikingly beautiful. In her old age, she was still stately.

“If you’ve finished gawping,” she says in unaccented English, “we’ll be on our way.”

They walk in silence to an apparition point.

“Potions, is it, that you like,” Lucilla asks.

“Yes,” she says tersely.

“I’m a spellmaker by trade and training.”

“I’ve come up with a few—spells—that is.”

“Oh you have, have you? Hogwarts not challenging enough for you?”

“Not always,” she says honestly.

“You can show me when we get home.”

By home she meant a small house in an all-wizarding village, something that appeared to be more common in Italy than it was in Britain, the wizarding population being somewhat denser.

Lucilla’s cottage was well-worn and if not exactly cosy then at least inoffensive. It had the air of everything as it should be. That year, few things of note happens. Severina finds that she can bear the quiet well. She gets a job at the apothecary, which was not difficult. The shop was always busy, with a steady stream of business from local witches and wizards, as well as the magical academy nearby. It had not even mattered she spoke stuttering Italian; she’d know potion ingredients in any language. She began apprenticing under Master Augello, old even for a wizard, with an acid tongue and unsparing exactitude. In the evenings, she practiced her spellwork with Lucilla; sometimes they’d discuss new spells they were working on. She’d soon found out that Lucilla’s specialty were healing spells to counteract the damage of the Dark Arts; some of the incantations ran to several feet of parchment and had to be accompanied by complex wand movements, others required joint casting by several witches or wizards, and still others could be classified as Dark magic in themselves.

Lucilla had looked over her own spells and laughed at some, shaking her head at others.

“You lack subtlety in your attacks, but I give you credit, they are amusing—and useful at a school such as Hogwarts, I imagine.” Then she saw _Sectumsempra_ , “This one is interesting, it must have been driven by hate. But you should never make a spell such as this without knowing how to undo it. You’ll find the intent behind healing is much more complex. I think it will be a fitting project for you.”

The autumn comes and goes, and soon she finds that summer is swelling and waning all too quickly. On what was to be her last day in Italy, Lucilla wakes her up before dawn.

“Your parents are dead,” she says without preamble.

“Was it the Dark Lord, or—the Death Eaters?”

“Inconclusive,” Lucilla replies, “the owl is from the ministry. We may go to the funeral but I suggest that afterwards, you return here with me.”

She nods, grateful for her aunt, but simmering with quiet anger. “My mother told you this might happen,” she says, remembering how tightly Eileen had held her hand.

Lucilla did not reply, but the twist in her mouth was enough.

She’d never had great love for her parents, but as she read through the news of their death in those stark black lines of ink, she could not help but feel something sharp and sweet in her chest. Her mother had died as she’d told her she would, with conviction. She could not help but burn up the little reserve of pity she had always held back for herself. She thought about selling the old house at Spinner’s End and found she did not regret the idea much at all.

 

\---

 

Lily sits between her and Lucilla at the front of the little Catholic church. Severina wears her mother’s crucifix around her long throat. There are few people at the funeral, her father’s old colleagues, and a few friends of her mother’s from her days at Hogwarts. It is a staid and unmoving affair. Her parents are buried side by side more out of convenience than anything else, although she had insisted on two separate headstones.

“I’d like to be cremated,” she says to Lucilla, and her great aunt nods.

Lily’s wedding band glints and she loops her arm around her and they walk to the house at Spinner’s End. It is a simple gold band, but worn with age and magic and so imbued with spells that she can smell it in the air like the reek of overripe flowers. She can tell that Lucilla knows it too, from the consternation in her face when she glances down at Lily.

“You’ve known Severina since childhood, Lily?”

“Yes, Miss Prince.”

“You have always taken good care of her, Lily.” It was not a question.

Lily looks at her through her pale lashes. “I hope Sev’s always been safe with me. Or safe, at any rate.”

“Do not forget to take care of yourself, Lily.”

“No, Miss Prince.” Lily presses closer to her friend. “I know Sev’s not here with me anymore. I have to try harder to remember her suspicious frame of mind.”

Lucilla laughs, clear and pealing. But Severina frowns.

They arrive at her parents’ house, and their conversation turns to more practical matters, packing everything her parents had owned and the refuse of her own childhood. She dearly wants to banish it all. Instead, she salvages some of the rarer volumes her mother had hidden, some of her father’s nicer hardbacks, and some less worn items of clothing. The rest she consigns to second hand shops of either the wizarding or muggle variety.

“Sev, here,” Lily calls, at one point, holding up a sheaf of paper.

They are letters written from her father to her mother. His hand was bold and cursive. In the letters he talks of perfectly mundane things, pulp novels and colleagues and work and his ageing parents and his dying sister. The letters are much too dull to be called love letters, and yet they are infused with familiarity and uncomplicated affection.

Lucilla looks over their shoulders. “They were old friends. Your mother always spoke of him when she stayed with me over the summers. She always wrote to him, though she wasn’t too keen on mentioning him to your grandparents.”

“That’s sweet,” Lily says hesitantly, studiously avoiding her gaze.

“Yes,” she murmurs.

Lily knows the end of the story, though she would ignore it.

Severina remembers flashing silver light and dappled green leaves, and Lily’s long hair tangled with her own in the overgrown summer grass, and the lines of ink she and Lily would trade with one another, full of a million inconsequential things. Something in the region of her heart ached.

“Burn the letters,” she says, “no one has any use for them now.”

Lily started. “But your parents…”

“—can no longer care,” she says finally. Under the hawk like gaze of her great aunt, she gathers up the yellowing letters and sets them alight with her wand, caressing the bottom edge. She could see Lily biting her lip as though wanting to physically restrain her, and tears beading at the corners of her lucid, green eyes.

She turns away and watches the flames flicker and die. The ash trickles down through the floorboards and seeps into the earth.

 

\---

 

“Your friend is ostentatious in showing off her wealth,” Lucilla says, as they walk the familiar winding path to her cottage in Italy.

“You can’t blame her, she’s muggleborn.”

“One would think that she’d be more careful about these things.”

“Lily’s powerful enough to handle it.”

“Power’s got nothing to do with it. Nor has blood. Not that that’s a popular opinion. Old Magic. No one bothers with it anymore. That headmaster of yours is irresponsible not to include it on the curriculum. You came to me knowing next to nothing, and I’ll wager your classmates know even less. I bet even that Dark Lord does not truly understand the powers he tries to evoke.”

Severina remembers Lucilla’s lecture as clearly as though it were preserved in a Pensieve. The lines in the earth had meaning. The motions of the waves and the air. The gold reforged again and again, and the earth from which it came. The vows spoken across generations. The blood spilled and tears shed and laughter shared. The sacrifices made. All of it had its own brand of magic.

“The Dark Lord does not have you for a teacher,” she says. She intends it to be playful, but it comes out broken.

“No, he does not.” Lucilla then does something she’d never done before and places her arm around Severina’s shoulders. Her aunt, who in the last few months had become so much more, is warm and soft and firm all at once. She feels tears on her face for the first time since her parents’ death.

 

\--- 

 

Several months after they have returned to Italy, she wakes up in the early hours of the morning. Icy dread was heavy in her stomach. She hears a commotion at the door, and Lucilla appears at the end of her bed. She cannot help but remember the last time.

“You have a letter.”

“Open it, please.”

Lucilla slitted the envelope with a long nail and pulled out a single sheet of parchment. Glancing down, she says, “It’s from Lily. You may want to read it yourself.” There was a hint of relief in her voice.

_My Friend,_

_I wanted to tell you in person, but circumstances prevent it. I miss you terribly and wish you were here with me at this time. I’ve just had some news. James and I are expecting a child. At this time, it feels like an unbearable weight, but also an unbelievable joy. There is war and we are a part of it. It is undeniable. But my child should know peace—I wish for my child a lifetime of peace._

_You, Sev, have a special place in my heart that no one will ever take. I want you to be in my child’s life as you have been in mine. Please, I would be honoured if you were to be my child’s godmother._

_Yours always,_

_Lily_

 

Lily’s signature was without her usual flourish. A blank space stretched between the two paragraphs of the letter as though Lily had paused for a long time between writing the two.

“What will your reply be?” Lucilla asks, interrupting her reverie.

“I don’t know,” she says, “I don’t think I can _be_ a guardian of any child. But I owe it to Lily.”

“Write back to her,” Lucilla says, and retreats back to her own room.

 

\---

 

_Dear Lily,_

_I accept your request to be godmother to your child._

_The world is quiet here. I hope it will continue to be so. You and your family will always be welcome._

_Your friend, always._

 

 

 

Six Years Later

 

The young boy arrived at the glass and chrome train station as she had done so years before. He was led by Dumbledore, who was dressed in a plush, electric blue velvet suit.

“I’m so very sorry for your loss, Miss Snape. It was a great loss to all of us.”

“I hear Voldemort has disappeared,” she says, acknowledging Dumbledore’s condolences with a nod.

“Indeed, the celebrations have been extensive throughout wizarding Britain.”

“You don’t believe he is gone for good,” she says, reading the underlying uneasiness in Dumbledore’s words.

“No, Miss Snape, I certainly don’t.” Dumbledore seemed almost surprised to hear himself admitting it. With a gentle glint in his eye, he turned to Harry. “Do you remember what we spoke about, Harry? This is your godmother, Severina. We met a few times with you before, about your living with her from now.”

The six-year-old boy nodded solemnly. “I remember. And Mum used to speak to Sev through the mirror, and Sev visited us through the fireplace sometimes.”

Without prompting, Harry reached out and took her slender hand. His palm was warm; his grip was strong. His green eyes seemed downcast when he mentioned his mother. She didn’t know what to do beyond giving his hand a squeeze.

“Thank you for bringing him, Professor Dumbledore.”

“Of course. Shall we go to your lovely cottage? I’d love to see dear Miss Prince again, if she’ll have me.”

“Aunt Lucilla is expecting all of us.” At the apparition point, Sev clasped Dumbledore’s and Harry’s arms, and took them to the small house that had been her home for so many years, and would be Harry’s soon.

“Harry, welcome,” Lucilla is already waiting by the gates of the front garden. “I am Lucilla, and I’ll be living here too.”

“Hello,” Harry says, rather shyly. He offers his small hand, which Lucilla takes and shakes gently.

“Albus, good to see you too—come in, all of you.”

Soon they are seated around the wooden kitchen table, holding cups of tea. Dumbledore and Lucilla are engaged in a complicated discussion about the geography of spells, or something else equally obscure that Severina hardly understands. She takes the time instead to regard Harry, who is swinging his legs back and forth, and sipping slowly from his teacup, cradling it in both hands. He is a quiet boy, she thinks, thoughtful perhaps, if given the chance.

Feeling her eyes on him, he glances up and offers a small smile. Then he reaches into his pocket and takes out a shrunken book, taps it with his hand and it expands. _The Iron Man_. The cover is as familiar as it has always been. Harry begins to read it to himself silently. He pretends not to notice that she is following along, reading the words upsidedown.

Once they have finished their tea, Dumbledore stands up and takes her aside to talk whilst Lucilla speaks easily with Harry in the kitchen.

“You are to call me if you require anything for the child; his parents have left him well off, and it would be possible to arrange for a monthly stipend.”

“Yes,” she says briefly, “we may correspond on the matter.”

“And his godfather, Sirius Black, owing to the delicate position he was in during the war as a spy, he wasn’t able to assume guardianship over Harry,” Dumbledore pauses. She has read of Black, the war hero, in the newspapers, who has his own scars to bear.

“Yes.”

“If it is acceptable, I could arrange for a time that he may wish to visit Harry—through the floo or using portkeys. Perhaps fortnightly?”

“That would be acceptable—it would be important to Harry to have other ties to the British wizarding world.”

“Wonderful! I will forward your address to him so that you may correspond.”

“Very well.”

“I must thank you, Miss Snape, again. I do believe you have truly done justice to the name of Hogwarts. Were your parents alive, they would be proud of you. Your Aunt Lucilla certainly is.”

“Headmaster, I only wish that I can do for Harry what no guardian in my childhood had ever done for me in my hour of need. I hope that under my care, he will never feel unwanted or ignored.” Dumbledore’s blue eyes widen at her words.

With a final wave, and a smile that is one tenth vicious, she sends Dumbledore out of the yard and into the street.

Back inside, she leads Harry to the spare bedroom that had been made up for him with new furniture and the personal belongings that could be salvaged from his old room. There were a few more boxes yet to unpack in the corner, mostly Lily’s and James’ books; she thought they’d unpack those together. This little boy would never know what it was like to be an ugly, awkward child, she promised.

 

\---

 

She had obtained her certification in potions some years before, and had taken up another apprenticeship in spellcraft with Lucilla’s colleague, a specialist in defensive spells. A small and plump woman who reminded her of Professor Sprout. Her new teacher encouraged her to speak with her other students, who became Severina’s colleagues—maybe even friends.

Harry picked up Italian easily, as only a young child thrown into a new world could. But he still spoke to her and Lucilla in English.

Often, she had no idea how to deal with a child who looked exactly like James and had Lily’s brilliant eyes. She was perhaps too severe and tactless. And the boy was grieving. But together, they muddled along. They read books, and went for walks, and acquired a pet cat. They rode broomsticks, went to local quidditch games, and Severina got incredibly bored at it all. Harry went to school with the other wizarding children in the village, and she persisted in her research. They argued occasionally, but more often than not, they laughed, and felt at ease in each other’s company.

The whole world is an accident, she often thinks, a mad accident where she has managed to avoid the circumstances of her misery—where at every step grief had been coupled with joy, and pain with healing. It had nothing to do with _deserving_.

They made some sort of family. And the eve of Harry’s eleventh birthday came all too soon.

 

\---

 

“I know your parents would be proud of you today,” she says, a little awkwardly, as she bids Harry farewell at King’s Cross Station.

“Thank you,” he says seriously, gazing up at her with his green, green eyes.

She smiles carefully. She does not say, “I am proud of you too.” But Harry knows this already, believes in it, and believes in her.

In that single moment, she allows herself, for once in her life, to feel everything as it was, without imagining anything different.

 

 

 


End file.
